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/ 24 August 2002

Prophecy of doom

New York City in 2022. Half the 40-million people in the swarming metropolis are unemployed, the air is thick with pollution, food and water are as precious as jewels. This was the world of the future as envisaged in the sci-fi thriller, Soylent Green, in 1973.

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/ 2 August 2002

Labelled disabled

We smile affectionately at the Morris dancers and bow if introduced to the Queen. But it does seem to me that in the matter of ”games”, such as those currently taking place in Manchester, north-west England, we are taking tradition too far to be healthy.

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/ 12 January 2002

British serial killer hangs himself

A British family doctor convicted of killing 15 patients, and suspected of killing 200 or more, was found dead in his prison cell on Tuesday, the British Prison Service said. Dr Harold Shipman was found hanging in his cell at Wakefield Prison in northern England at 6.20am and was pronounced dead at 8:10am.

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/ 1 January 2002

Famine becomes Mugabe weapon

The rains have come to the undulating pastures of northern Matabeleland. In the bread basket of Zimbabwe, the seed should be in the ground by now. But instead the rural poor are bracing themselves for a catastrophe on a scale not seen since the Matabeleland massacres a generation ago.

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/ 1 January 2002

How the old man bridged the sea

More than 40 years after his death, the novelist Ernest Hemingway is playing a key part in the delicate relations between the country of his birth and his adopted home. The Cuban government is to work with American scholars and descendants of the man who wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls in a unique project to preserve the writer’s legacy.

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/ 1 January 2002

North Korea’s balancing act

On the other side of the world from the White House, the brutal dictator of a rogue state where millions are close to starvation is stealthily acquiring the nuclear arsenal and missiles to threaten tens of thousands US troops and two stalwart American allies.